On Translating MEMORIAL, 29 JUNE: A Conversation with Misha Hoekstra

Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg, translated by Misha Hoekstra.

Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Misha Hoekstra about his translation of Tine Høeg’s stunning Memorial, 29 June, to mark the novel’s publication today. Hoekstra, an International Booker Prize shortlistee and recipient of the Danish Translation Prize, discusses how he navigated the lyricism, comic timing, and clever use of misdirection and misunderstanding that are so intrinsic to Høeg’s precise and powerful prose.

What drew you to translating Tine Høeg’s Memorial, 29 June?

I loved translating Tine’s first book, New Passengers, especially the short unpunctuated line she uses as the basic unit of text and the way she plays the lines off each other. That same line – with the addition of a few odd commas and periods – is also the fundamental building block of Memorial, 29 June. The new book probes deeper, exploring the making and meaning of art and how secrets can poison friendship, while maintaining the wit and the attention to language that made New Passengers such an unmitigated delight to work on.

The context of these individual lines is often hidden until you’ve finished reading them, with lines flicking between Asta’s thoughts, the voices of others, flashbacks and text messages. Tine’s way of cutting the text makes you concentrate on where you are, often requiring you to reread sections to get the full picture. How did you tackle translating this complex weaving of narratives and timelines?

Tine does a masterful job of orchestrating these lines, where misdirection and misunderstanding are baked into the form. She has a keen ear for the significant detail that can sketch someone’s attitude in a single stroke, and she knows just how much information to divulge in a line to enable the reader to discern its source, and just how much to withhold to encourage resonant misreading. While I often found that dance easy to replicate, there were many places where I had to cast around for something that would create an analogous effect. In addition, the lines never wrap around; in cases where a direct translation would spill onto the next line, I had to find a workaround that would convey the essential information in fewer words that still respect the line’s voice. It was more akin to translating poetry or song lyrics than prose, and some lines required extensive brainstorming to find a solution that sang with the right voice. Fortunately, English is blessed with a vast vocabulary and a word order that is more plastic than Danish. The text encouraged me to take a very playful approach to the translation, and often I found myself laughing out loud. There were also passages I found tremendously moving – I’m thinking particularly of the art exhibition on darkness, which is a tour de force (and a tour de chambre, which was the book’s title in Danish). I imagine that Tine underwent similar emotions while writing the book.

New Passengers by Tine Høeg, also translated by Hoekstra, was published by Lolli in 2020.

In addition to the colloquial speech, there are jokes; the characters have a playfulness and humour in their language. Did they present particular challenges during the translation?

Jokes and witticisms are tricky to write, and trickier to translate! Especially when, as is often the case in Tine’s work, they revolve around language. Because the kind of humour and its narrative function are typically more important than a joke’s actual content, I ended up inventing a lot of jokes from thematically adjacent material. It’s time-consuming good fun. That was also true of the book’s other kinds of linguistic play – most notably, the red-herring crossword clue whose solution depends on the part of speech in another clue, and the mnemonic that two of the characters use when they’re revising for an exam on skin layers.

What are you working on now?

Two years ago, I was fortunate to be awarded a three-year unrestricted literary fellowship from the Danish Arts Foundation. I’ve finally finished off all the translation projects I had in the pipeline, and now that my desk is cleared, at least metaphorically, I’m using 2023 to focus on my own writing – a novel and an album of new songs.

What books have recently been important to you as a translator, writer and reader?

Three books of contemporary fiction blew the top of my head off this past year. The first was Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. It’s a tremendously engaging exploration of sex, theatre and power – and then halfway through, Choi brilliantly reframes the narrative. And then she does it again. The other highly successful marriage of gorgeous prose and formal invention is The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. While its depiction of a world where people can access a lifetime of memories in exchange for uploading their consciousness to the internet has garnered the most attention, at heart it’s a story about the human desire for connection that expertly employs a broad variety of narrative techniques. Finally, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, in Megan McDowell’s riveting translation, is an unsettling gem of a book, an ominous tale of parental love and poison.

Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg, translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra, publishes today. Purchase your copy here.

MISHA HOEKSTRA has translated numerous Danish authors, including Hans Christian Andersen and Maren Uthaug. In 2017, he received the Danish Translation Prize, and his translation of Dorthe Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

TINE HØEG (b. 1985) is a Danish author. Her novel New Passengers, published by Lolli Editions in 2020, won an English PEN Award and Bogforum’s Debutantpris, the prize awarded each year for the best literary debut published in Denmark. Høeg’s own adaptation of the novel has been staged at the Royal Danish Theatre. She lives in Copenhagen.